Art must act.

Throughout his decades as an author, Harold Rosenberg called on artists to reject clichés and conformity and instead take action.

By: Blake Smith, historian and translator / aeon.co
Translation: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

The public has rightly lost faith in politicians, experts, and the media. Progress seems impossible, whether in politics or culture. Massive, disconnected bureaucracies, the deceptions of the capitalist market, and the ideologies disseminated by parties, intellectuals, and institutions fill us with misleading clichés and false identities. We are no longer able to discern the truth, communicate it properly to one another, or find an authentic role through which to connect with others and escape the forces that divert our potential for action true, in thoughtless conformism or false boasting.

So argued—from the crisis of World War II until their deaths in the 1970s—two of the most important American intellectuals of the mid-20th century: Harold Rosenberg and Hannah Arendt. Close friends for nearly three decades, their relationship inspired intertwined theories of action and judgment, as well as a shared turn toward the role of cultural critic for a large audience. Yet while Arendt is now seen as a central figure in the modern philosophical canon, Rosenberg is all but forgotten, as is the critical dialogue between them.

Rosenberg was one of the leading American art thinkers in the years after World War II, when the United States replaced Europe as the center of the art world. Thanks in part to his critical essays, artists such as Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock entered art history and made modern art synonymous with American culture. He also influenced and was influenced by Arendt, with whom he became friends in the late 40s. The two developed a set of ideas about how what they called "action" connected aesthetics and politics. Over the next two decades, they continued to reexamine the meaning of action while both teaching in the Committee on Social Thought program at the University of Chicago.

In the four decades since his death, Rosenberg has faded into a little-remembered caricature. His particular ideas about action—unsystematic, ever-evolving, and treated in essays collected in a volume that has been out of print since the 80s—have been dismissed by art historians such as Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster as “half-romantic, half-petit bourgeois” and “psychological stuff,” as Christa Noel Robbins puts it in The artist as author [Artist or Author, 2021]. While these scholars are wrong to dismiss Rosenberg, they are right to see him as an opponent of the kind of criticism they practice. His essays are filled with provocative critiques of the way in which academics, museum professionals, gallerists, and art critics reduce artworks to instruments of pedagogy or profit, diverting attention from the true essence of artistic creation.

The artists Rosenberg wrote about were people he understood to be struggling to create a human life for themselves, amidst the oppressions and illusions of capitalism. In doing so, he said, they broke away from the conventions of art history. The production of beautiful objects, membership in a self-conscious avant-garde, the representation of politically useful themes, and even the pursuit of originality fell away as they no longer sought to create art, but to act - whether on canvas, in sculpture, or through the reactions their actions provoked. Art criticism, Rosenberg insisted in his most important and much-misunderstood essay, American action painters [The American Action Painters, 1952], was the most inadequate of all possible responses to such an action. "The new painting," he declared, "has demolished all distinctions between art and life," and there was no need for criticism in the sense of a specialist's evaluative search for quality, but rather an existential exercise of judgment. Instead of describing a work's place in the unfolding of historical trends, or of discovering its interest as a lens on social problems, the critic must judge the artist's action according to the way it reveals life.

Rosenberg's own life, best known through a 2021 biography by Debra Bricker Balken, began in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in New York City in 1906. Ambitious but without a clear direction, Rosenberg wandered after law school (he never practiced law) among the bohemians of Greenwich Village. Through his friendships with aspiring young artists and intellectuals, he became acquainted with the major currents of the time: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism. Rosenberg's creative activity was as varied as his intellectual environment. For much of the 30s, he directed his energies erratically between painting, poetry, literature, and journalism. All of these endeavors were influenced by his leftist politics. For example, his poem Front [The Front, 1935] presents Rosenberg as he attempts to master a modernist, multi-perspective style, in which he glorifies the violence committed by sailors, union members, and farmers against the forces of reaction symbolized by “a bastard businessman.”

As the Great Depression, which began in 1929, became an era-defining catastrophe, Rosenberg, like many young thinkers, found inspiration for a new social model in the Soviet Union. During the mid-30s, the Soviet government encouraged communist groups around the world to cooperate with the non-communist democratic left as part of the so-called Popular Front. Rosenberg joined several of these groups, working as an editor in Art Front, a Popular Front-inspired periodical created by two artists' unions affiliated with the Communist Party. He also participated in a number of New Deal-era projects aimed at finding work for writers and artists. He wrote catalogs and other texts for murals funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and prepared an anthology of new American writing, American things [American Stuff], organized by the Federal Writers' Project. It seemed possible in those years to imagine partnerships linking artists, writers, the American left, the Roosevelt administration, and international communism.

By the late 30s, Rosenberg had abandoned this synthesis. Like many others on the left, he was deeply disillusioned by the Soviet Union’s judicial spectacles and purges, its pact with Nazi Germany, and its invasion of Finland. He was also disillusioned by the narrow, doctrinaire stances of Stalinist-inspired activists on the American art scene, as well as by the pale, backward art subsidized by the WPA. The murals of heroic farmers and workers resembled nothing more than the art promoted by Stalin and Hitler in their respective regimes. The Popular Front, in both politics and aesthetics, seemed to have reached a dead end.

The artists in Rosenberg’s circle shared his sense of disillusionment. One of his closest friends in the 30s was Barnett Newman (1905–1970), a substitute public school teacher who painted in his spare time. Like Rosenberg, Newman was a Marxist with increasingly free-thinking leanings. He ran as an independent for mayor of New York City in 1933, promising that “people of culture,” like himself, would bring “action,” a term that would later become Rosenberg’s trademark. Those capable of “aesthetic experience,” Newman argued, should unite in defense of the common man against moneyed interests. His platform offered free art schools, “a noncommercial citizen film studio,” and similar programs. By the end of the decade, Newman had lost faith in the left and in politically engaged art. In a turn that would inspire Rosenberg, Newman destroyed his paintings and began searching for a new style that would lead him to his precious, simple abstract work - Onement I, in 1948.

Yet, as Newman would later recall, Rosenberg constantly pushed him during this crisis to “explain” what his new style, emptied of all figure or symbol, might mean for the world. Despite appearances, abstract painting—a response to political deadlock and the apparent collapse of hope for a progressive left—was still political, and, in fact, Newman told Rosenberg that, if properly interpreted, his work would signify the end of “all state capitalism and totalitarianism.” However much its message required decoding with the help of a sympathetic intellectual like Rosenberg, Newman’s painting could still be a political act. As the two friends grappled with their mutual loss of ideological security, Rosenberg was helping Newman find a new artistic method—while inventing a new persona for himself as an art critic.

During the 40s, while encouraging Newman in his self-transformation into an abstract artist, Rosenberg doubted whether fruitful political action was still possible. He worried, in fact, that political progress was being hindered precisely by the allure of seemingly new characters. Writing mainly for the small-circulation but highly influential Trotskyist journal, Partisan Review, he claimed that “ex-communist” intellectuals, like himself, as they drifted away from the left, were so “confused by the current world situation” that they could grasp at any “religious or mythological device” for the illusion of understanding what role they should play and who they should be. Confused people, who felt that something was terribly wrong in modern society but were unable to explain their situation, much less find a way out, took on fantastical identities—as Aryans, as the New Soviet Man, as defenders of Western civilization—in dramas set in the distant past or utopian future. Although false, these new identities and dramas were at least comprehensible. They offered a script that told confused individuals who they were and what they should do, giving them a sense of being able to act.

This analysis - which Rosenberg would express in a series of essays that reexamined Louis Bonaparte's eighteenth birthday [Until the 18th Brumaire des Louis Napoleon, 1852] of Karl Marx - reflected the ideas that Arendt was developing in The origins of totalitarianism [The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951]. Both thinkers argued that the extremist ideologies of the right and the left responded to the real problems of modern society by offering collective identities and narratives that were a substitute for real action and the authentic self. The liberals who opposed these ideologies, they warned, were no less vulnerable to these illusions. In fact, Rosenberg began to suspect that “small magazines,” such as Partisan Review and the intellectual scene of New York after Stalinism were actually distributors of this wrong kind of thinking and that intellectuals, who saw themselves as free thinkers, were just as deluded as the masses hypnotized by the propaganda of Stalin and Hitler.

In his essay A flock of independent minds [The Herd of Independent Minds, 1948], Rosenberg attacked Partisan Review-, among other things, for their claim to constitute a cultural and intellectual world separate from the degraded mass culture of American capitalism. Authors of Partisan Review, such as Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald, complained about the rise of a consumerist and hedonistic entertainment industry, filled with banality, both for its lowering of intellectual standards and its power to alienate the working class from meaningful politics. Although he shared their concerns, Rosenberg insisted that such publications fostered a false sense of being outside and superior to the standardized production of public opinion through the media. In reality, they were just one particular demographic segment within that broader process of manipulation—perhaps all the more vulnerable to deception, since they imagined themselves to be intellectually independent. By promoting a complacent conformism masquerading as free thought, the small magazines, he warned, were moving toward a vague liberalism that replaced real opportunities for intellectual and political action with a comfortable in-group identity.

Such disappointment was the dominant theme of the essay that launched Rosenberg's career as an art critic, American action paintersPublished in 1952 in ArtNews, a publication that was becoming the leading place to write about the emerging group of New York-based abstract painters such as Newman, de Kooning, and Pollock, the essay argued that these artists were representative of the difficulties faced by all those living after what Rosenberg called the “great crisis” of the 1930s and 40s. Faith in progress of any kind, whether through political revolution led by the organized left or by an avant-garde of modernist artists building on the innovations of the previous half-century, had become untenable. It was no longer clear what art was for. The proponents of the “new painting” responded to this situation by abandoning both politics and aesthetics—the goal of changing society or of creating beautiful, interesting, or otherwise significant objects. Instead, they sought, with a “desperate recognition of moral and intellectual fatigue,” to “act” through the creation of artistic works “in the form of personal revolts.”

In the field of visual arts, they were similar to the existentialists of French literature and philosophy, with whom Rosenberg was closely acquainted as a regular contributor to the journal. Les Temps modern of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (about whom he had written an earlier version of American action painters). Crucially, Rosenberg distinguished himself from his French existentialist interlocutors by emphasizing that such efforts should not be judged in terms of authenticity; they are not about “being true to oneself” or “committed” to arbitrary choices. By calling them action, he emphasized that these experiments should be judged by their effectiveness in changing the situation and character of those who carry them out.

Rosenberg was not praising the American artists he described. Notably, he did not mention any of them by name, nor did he describe any particular work of art. Contemporaries, however, understood that he was referring to the leading abstract painters of New York—Rosenberg, after all, was known to be friends with Newman and de Kooning. Nor was he alone in considering them to be artists of importance, or in paying intellectual attention to the rise of American abstraction after the social realism of the New Deal era. These painters were being praised by Rosenberg’s colleagues and rivals in the small magazines, most notably by Greenberg, who saw them as representing a further step in art history, advancing in the long evolution away from image-centered canvases toward the liberation of pure form and color. Soon, abstract painters, especially Pollock, would become well-known figures, elevated to a pedestal as interesting rebels whose masculine attitudes matched their aggressive brushstrokes and spray techniques. The fierce hostility of conservative critics in The New York Times it only added to their aura as rebels.

Rosenberg took a stand on American abstraction that was different from Greenberg’s formalist assessment, the media mythology, or the conservative misunderstanding. Against Greenberg—and sounding almost like a reactionary nostalgic for the golden days of the Beaux Arts academy—he argued that the work of abstract artists could not be understood as art in the traditional sense. It was not the latest phase of art history; its very existence showed that art history was as dead as the ideologies of Marxism, nationalism, and liberalism. Some people might still be fascinated by the beliefs and identities that belonged to the nineteenth century, but they no longer revealed a path forward for individual or collective action. “Modern art,” he said, was simply “a comedy of a revolution.” He thus linked it to the pseudo-revolutions through which the working classes of Europe were deceived by the extreme left and right, or to the farce of Napoleon III trying to repeat his uncle's career.

If he could no longer believe in the Popular Front’s promise that art and the left could unite against oppression, Rosenberg would not fall back on the pre-Marxist illusion that art had a history separate from that of politics. He also questioned the mystique of the artist as a courageous, singular individual, still capable of expressing himself in an increasingly oppressive and dark world. This vision still contained the hope that, amidst the collapse of political prospects for a more just future, there might be a way to keep alive the techniques of creation through which individuals could escape routine, cliché, and illusion, and with which they could one day revive political life. By creating a new “identity” through “action,” exemplary artists could draw attention to our shared capacities for “personal revolt” and gather around themselves a “real audience” attentive to the “new creative principle.” There was a terrible danger, Rosenberg warned, that this emphasis on small acts of symbolic defiance would degenerate into a “religious movement,” a cult in which famous personalities and objects would be venerated by a “caste” of expert priests—forming a new inner circle as deluded as the readers and writers of small ex-socialist magazines. His most urgent concern was, in fact, to warn of the danger that a growing art market and institutional “bureaucracies of taste” would enslave abstract art. He was skeptical whether the “myth of personality” of the “lone artist” was a real source of resistance or a trap into which artists would allow themselves to be enslaved.

Over the next decades, until his death in 1978, Rosenberg tried to defend what he saw as American abstraction’s fragile potential for authentic personal and political resistance—from his detractors, from misguided enthusiasts, as well as from the media and an increasingly institutionalized art world. Some of his most insightful writings address the legacy of his old friend, Barnett Newman. While the first wave of postwar American abstract artists—who achieved critical and commercial success, such as Pollock and de Kooning—were distinguished by dramatic brushstrokes that seemed to express strong, eccentric personalities, Newman’s paintings were almost indeterminate in content. The only reference to the painting of his contemporaries was a single vertical line in the center, which he humorously called “zip.” Newman died in 1970, just before his work became popular among a new generation of artists and critics associated with minimalism and color field painting - such as Kenneth Noland. Themselves weary of the heroic attitudes and "expressionist" paintings of Pollock and de Kooning, they revered him as a precursor to their own style.

In essays and a posthumous monograph, Rosenberg struggled to establish Newman's independence from both his more famous contemporaries and those who called him a precursor. The supporters of the former, he complained, had ignored Newman's "originality," while those of the latter ignored his "philosophy" which aimed to create "sublime" experiences for an age in which traditional religion had disappeared. Many of the titles that Newman had given his works, such as Stations of the Cross (1958-66), referred to religion, while the works themselves were devoid of any obvious religious content.

Newman’s approach, Rosenberg argued, was a deliberate “naivety.” Newman was committed to “his own understanding of things, independent of the prevailing opinion,” betting the meaning of his work—and throughout his life—on the seemingly absurd possibility that “the repeated image of a striped rectangle” might awaken in viewers the “higher themes” that had inspired the sacred art of the past. The only way to reconnect with recent experience, Newman argued, was to use the techniques of abstraction as a kind of ascetic purification that bypassed art history, moving the spectator “beyond aesthetics in an act of faith” to the sublime without theology, ideology, ritual, or dogma. Rosenberg acknowledged that this was a complicated matter. It made art critics uncomfortable because it implied that art criticism—even the category of “art” itself—was irrelevant to Newman’s aims, which were more like those of biblical prophets than Picasso, Pollock, or Noland. But that was the very definition of action—to break away from convention, to turn art against itself, to refuse to uphold either old traditions or fashionable labels, and to take the risk that your actions, even your entire life, may have been in vain.

In Rosenberg's writings, Newman appears as a secular saint, while Andy Warhol appears as a Judas or the devil. In the 60s, as the New York art scene turned towards Pop Art, Rosenberg attacked what he considered the grotesque and growing collaboration of artists with elites, celebrity culture and capitalism. Warhol, he argued, had fulfilled the ominous predictions of American action painters, showing “that the appreciation of the art world for the objects presented to it could be programmed by drawing attention to the artist.” Instead of the construction of a persona being a difficult and heroic task through which the artist managed to maintain a degree of freedom from an oppressive society and inhuman economy, it had become just another technique of media mastery and “capital accumulation.” Rosenberg’s hostility to Warhol did not win him favor with subsequent generations of critics and art historians, for whom Warhol’s portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy or dollar signs were seen as interesting immersions in capitalist culture or even as understatements of it. But, like Rosenberg, he was not an unconditional admirer of abstract expressionism, nor was he a dedicated enemy of art that anticipated postmodernism or played with popular culture.

For example, in the mid-70s, he praised Saul Steinberg, an artist who often contributed drawings to The New Yorker (and View of the world from 9th Avenue). Steinberg's success in a major publication and in the medium of "caricature," Rosenberg argued, had blinded his contemporaries to the fact that he was seeking, on his own terms, new avenues for what Rosenberg called action. His "ultimate subject," Rosenberg claimed, was not jokes but "style" itself and the ways in which different styles could be absorbed into a "visual autobiography" that simultaneously revealed and concealed the artist's self. Working within major cultural institutions, immersing himself in historical references and cultural trends, Steinberg sought to renew them from within in order to open up avenues for experimentation. This was almost the opposite of the strategy pursued by the "lone artist" that Rosenberg analyzed in American action painters, and in many ways similar to what Warhol pursued. If the pose of the isolated, marginal creator who challenges social conventions, and that of the free-thinking intellectual who rejects mass society had become deceptive masks of a declining liberal order, then perhaps the solution, after all, was to create avenues for action from within, not outside, the structures that seemed to hinder it.

The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal gave new impetus to Rosenberg’s long-standing search for a character who could provide resistance to what he saw as the systematic deception of American politics and culture. The Johnson and Nixon administrations had lied to the public for years about the nature and extent of what he considered a monstrous and doomed war in Southeast Asia. They had done so with the cooperation of the media and the academic experts who filled the Defense Department and think tanks. Rosenberg was not comforted by the fact that professional journalists had uncovered the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident or Nixon’s cover-ups. He argued that the lies were so widespread, and often mixed with true or credible information, that it was becoming impossible for members of the American public to form “any objective picture of what was happening.”

The public, he suggested, had every right to lose faith not only in politicians, journalists, and certain academics, but in all those who filled these roles. But it was a mistake to retreat to what was becoming “its typical response”: “indolence” and “indifference.” Whereas a generation earlier Rosenberg had worried that both the public and intellectuals were easy prey to the deceptions of Stalinism, fascism, nationalism, Christian conservatism, or liberalism, he now feared that Americans, who had rightly become cynical, might cease to believe in any kind of political identity or action. In such an atmosphere, he insisted, it became all the more important for writers, like artists, to show that “in action there is always the possibility that something unforeseen will emerge.” One of the few ways to do this, he argued, was for intellectuals, setting aside any pretense of expert knowledge, to express in a convincing and personal “style” their reactions to what they were seeing—with genuine disgust and indignation, not with cold, impartial analysis. Instead of assuming the guise of the “expert” who presents himself as the possessor of impartial facts (a role for which the public had only deserved contempt), the intellectual who wants to reach the public must become “a participant in family dinner conversations,” speaking directly (albeit “extraordinarily brilliantly”) about the things we all see and feel. In an age that no longer believes in truth, Rosenberg warned half a century ago, the intellectual must become a kind of populist, just as the artist can become a comedian.

Whether Rosenberg was “right” about Steinberg, Warhol, or Newman and the abstract artists of the postwar years—that is, whether what he said about them helps us better appreciate the real features of their work and its significance—is something that the reader must judge in relation to the visual evidence. What is most important about Rosenberg’s critique is that, while shifting attention from one artist to another, he consistently sought to assess what the work of a given artist showed about the way in which an individual in our society could use the cultural and institutional resources at his disposal to break away from old personas and to form a new, more expansive and empowering identity. Over the decades of writing about art, he always believed that artists should be judged by their success or failure in action—that is, in finding ways to resist routine, cliché, and conformity on the one hand, and self-deceptive illusions and fantasies on the other. These twin evils, he argued, arise from the very nature of our capitalist society.

Few art critics or art historians appreciated Rosenberg's emphasis on action, or understood its connection to a profound critique of the contemporary world. But his friend, Hannah Arendt, adopted many of his ideas in her magnum opus. The human condition [The Human Condition, 1958], which argues that political life, like aesthetics, is characterized by an innate human need—though now largely ignored—for self-expression through performances that are not work, routine, or ritual, but are what, echoing Rosenberg, she called “action.” Like her friend, Arendt worried that the possibilities for action in our society were being eroded by mechanization and bureaucratization on the one hand, and by illusory forms of pseudo-action on the other—ranging from the numbing pleasures of the entertainment industry to the chimeras of mass politics. In an essay that marked a turning point in her thinking, Crisis in culture [The Crisis in Culture, 1960], she mentioned Rosenberg as she began to argue that the task of intellectuals today is not to criticize mass culture, isolated from it, but to exercise what she called “taste” and “judgment” within it. In other words, to become public intellectuals by following Rosenberg’s example.

In 1979, a year after Rosenberg’s death, his literary representative, Michael Denneny, gave an interview to the University of Chicago’s student newspaper—reflecting on his time with Rosenberg and Arendt in the late 60s and early 70s. In that interview, and in an essay published that same year, he claimed that Arendt and Rosenberg were “the most important contemporary thinkers on the nature of action.” They had achieved, during their friendship, a “unique union” of ideas. Perhaps it is in the nature of action and judgment that they cannot be explained theoretically, but only practiced in concrete cases. In that case, the greatest contributions of Rosenberg and Arendt are the examples they set, in their public writings and in their relationships with students and friends, in their steadfast struggle to judge with reason and sincerity - even when the criteria for judgment, all the old standards of tradition and the certainties of political belief, seemed shaky. /Telegraph/